Obama to governors: Stop vilifying public employees!

posted at 12:55 pm on February 28, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

Barack Obama addressed the nation’s governors today with sympathy over budgetary crises, but a warning not to solve their shortfalls by infringing on the rights of public employees. He also scolded governors for vilifying and denigrating PEUs, which raises the question of whether Obama has bothered to look at the protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Besides, the governors in question are mainly fighting to limit collective bargaining rights to a standard that the federal government prohibits for its own employees. RCP has the video:

Kimberly Strassel pre-emptively explained the hypocrisy in her column Friday at the Wall Street Journal:

It will no doubt surprise you to learn that President Obama, the great patron of the working man, also happens to be the great CEO of one of the least union-friendly shop floors in the nation.

This is, after all, the president who has berated Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, calling the very idea an “assault on unions.” This is also the president who has sicced his political arm, Organizing for America, on Madison, allowing the group to fill buses and plan rallies. Ah, but it’s easy to throw rocks when you live in a stone (White) house.

Fact: President Obama is the boss of a civil work force that numbers up to two million (excluding postal workers and uniformed military). Fact: Those federal workers cannot bargain for wages or benefits. Fact: Washington, D.C. is, in the purest sense, a “right to work zone.” Federal employees are not compelled to join a union, nor to pay union dues. Fact: Neither Mr. Obama, nor the prior Democratic majority, ever acted to give their union chums a better federal deal.

Scott Walker, eat your heart out.

For this enormous flexibility in managing his work force, Mr. Obama can thank his own party. In 1978, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, backed by a Democratic Congress, passed the Civil Service Reform Act. Washington had already established its General Schedule (GS) classification and pay system for workers. The 1978 bill went further, focused as it was on worker accountability and performance. It severely proscribed the issues over which employees could bargain, as well as prohibited compulsory union support.

Democrats weren’t then (and aren’t now) about to let their federal employees dictate pay. The GS system, as well as the president and Congress, sees to that. Nor were they about to let workers touch health-care or retirement plans. Unions are instead limited to bargaining over personnel employment practices such as whether employees are allowed to wear beards, or whether the government must pay to clean uniforms. These demands matter, though they are hardly the sort to break the federal bank.

Perhaps Walker should start arguing that he wants to give public-sector workers greater protection than federal workers. Let’s see how the media covers that.

Just as a reminder, let’s recall exactly who has been vilifying whom in this debate:

This message is to notify you that President Obama signed three documents on December 22, 2010, that relate to pay rates for Federal civilian employees. First, the President signed legislation to prohibit statutory pay adjustments for most Federal civilian employees for a 2-year period. (See section 147 of the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 (Pub. L. 111-242), as amended by section 1(a) of the Continuing Appropriations and Surface Transportation Extensions Act, 2011 (Pub. L. 111-322).) Second, the President issued a memorandum asking that agencies suspend similar increases to pay schedules and rates that are set by administrative discretion. The law and the President’s memorandum cover pay adjustments that would otherwise take effect during the period beginning on January 1, 2011, and ending on December 31, 2012. Third, the President signed an Executive order documenting the 2011 frozen pay rates for certain civilian employee pay systems and establishing the 2011 increased pay rates for the uniformed services. (Members of the uniformed services are not covered by the pay freeze.)

The President has directed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to issue guidance on implementing the pay freeze. In the coming days, OPM will post guidance at http://www.opm.gov on the law, Presidential memorandum, and Executive order and the impact of those documents on Federal pay rates in 2011.

I would love for just one of these Governors to stand up and say directly to Obama, “Mr. President, would you care to comment on the issue of Democratic state senators who choose to flee their state rather than do the job they were elected to do in the first place?”

And make sure that question is asked while the news cameras are running.

…Let me just say it. The Obama/Clinton/media left are comfortable with the unrest in our society today. It allows them to blame and demonize their opponents (doctors, insurance companies, Wall Street, talk radio, Fox News, SCOTT WALKER [my addition]) in order to portray their regime as the great healer of all our ills, thus expanding their power and control over our society.

A clear majority of the American people want no part of this. They instinctively know that the Obama way is not how things get done in this country. They are motivated by love. Not hate, not sedition. They love their country and want to save it from those who do not.

Federal Employees have all the rights given to them by Congress under Title 5 US code (competitive civil service) or Title 10 US Code (Excepted service). These rights are substantial which is why Unions have no place other then as the Democratic Party’s bagman that transfers taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the Democratic Party.

Heah Union man: Big Taxpayer is coming to chain you to your desk and force you to listen to Rush Limbaugh while Ann Coulter talks dirty to you. Run away union man, Big Taxpayer is going to get you!

I’m soon going to be paying more for my health care, contributing more towards my retirement, and for the 5th year in a row I won’t have a cost of living raise. But it’s a job and I’m happy to have it. If I went downtown and joined a protest for 3 weeks I wouldn’t have a job to come back to at all.

So I guess Obama is saying we should stop vilifying union thugs who physically threaten and accost peaceful tea party members, or who threaten and shout down reporters who are asking questions they don’t like, or………

LMAO. I had a FB friend (libwit, of course) not only use the Mubarek-Stalin-Hilter-Nazi references on Walker, but she then compared using the filibuster unfavorably to Fleebagging. She thinks fleebagging is actually a much more responsible course of action

Why oh why does Obama always say just the wrong thing. He has a knack for it–one could even call it a gift or talent. Here he stands before a room full of governors and scolds them as if they were naughty children. I will never, ever understand this man. Here he has a chance to win their support, to learn from them and they from him and work out a rapport and some communication and he blows it!! I just don’t get it–just don’t understand how he can be so out of touch.

There was an interesting article in the WSJ from eco professor Robert Barro about the anti trust laws and the unions collective bargaining.

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.
In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166011983939364.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The in-state and out-of-state democrats, however, have conspired with the President in a manner intended to damage the economic stability and ordinary course of business of a sovereignty. What he has done is set in motion a method of collapsing the economic stability of each state. By using the democratic party and unions to create unrest and chaos in each of the states, so far Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, NJ, for starters, he is interfering with the sovereignty of each state to establish their budgets preventing the individual states to from managing their state affairs. If states are unable to balance their budgets and forced into financial disaster, they will seek bailouts from the federal government. Those bailouts will come with strong strings attached, thereby giving the federal government control over the states that was never intended within the Constitution. Furthermoere, this interference is done for his personal gains; 1) he is owned by the unions and is obligated to support them over the interest of the Country, and 2) he needs to support unions over the well-being of the country to get re-elected.